Chinese abortion ad: Is it crossing the line?

A hospital in Chongqing, China, recently released an advertisement offering half-price abortions for women who show a student ID. The ad is making the rounds on the Internet.

According to the Web site Shanghailist, the advertisement (above) reads:

Students are our future, but when something happens to them, who will help and protect them? Chongqing Huaxi Women’s Hospital has started Students Care Month, where those students who come to get an abortion can get 50% off if they show their student ids. Abortion surgeries are the most advanced in the world, won’t stretch (your womb), won’t hurt, it’s quick, and you can do what you want afterward, it won’t affect your studies or your work.

The advertisement has created quite a stir. When Babble’s Strollerderby blogger Brett Singer wrote in a post, “Pro-life, pro-choice, wherever you stand in the abortion debate, I think we can perhaps all agree that a hospital advertising ‘half price abortions if you show your student ID’ crosses a line, the majority of his readers disagreed.

One reader commented:

I’m not offended at all. This sounds like a good policy to me, I wish abortions were more affordable here in the US. No one should ever decide to have a baby just because they can’t afford an abortion. In my state, the state children’s health insurance program will pay for abortions for women who meet income requirements, but you have to wait 2-4 weeks to be approved. The limit for abortion here is 12 weeks, so depending on when the woman finds out she is pregnant, many would be past the first trimester if they waited for the coverage. Kind of sounds like you are just trying to fan the flames of the abortion debate.

Another reader wrote in:

China is not the West, get used to it. Students “study” (read: work) up to 10 hours a day, at minimum 6 days a week. Many have tutors to fill in their spare time. If a student doesn’t get into University (the point of all this study), then they often feel inadequate and are prone to suicide. It is THAT much of a big deal. In China you get ONE chance at university: the high school leaver exam. There are night classes for adults, sure, but they can’t just wander into a university, flash some ID and get accepted like they can here (New Zealand). You simply don’t become a single mother in China. They worry much more about shaming their families than us–having a child out of wedlock would bring shame. In the context of China, this ad is not worth mentioning. Maybe it’d cause a stir in the US…Maybe if there were cut-price abortions with student ID here I wouldn’t see so many single mothers struggling along.

And another reader commented:

I think the problem is that, here in the United States, people have allowed anti-abortion activists to frame the debate so much, that even people who are pro-choice are expected to treat abortions as necessary tragedies. Women are expected to experience some kind of negative psychological effects after having an abortion, she is supposed to speak about it softly and with regret, or preferably, not at all. However, the reality is that an early abortion is a relatively minor outpatient surgery with a low risk for complications. I have personally taken my sister and two friends to have an abortion, and the only thing that they felt afterward was immense relief. And even though I agree that abortions should be affordable for all woman who need one, it makes sense to me to offer students a special discount, as students often do not work or only work part-time.

Whether you think the advertisement crosses the line or not, it definitely shows the difference in attitudes about abortion in the United States and China. Or at least the ad signifies the prevalence of abortion in modern-day Chinese culture.

The number of abortions performed in China each year tops 13 million according to CNN. And this number is expected to be much higher because it’s based on figures collected only from registered medical institutions. It’s assumed that many abortions are performed at unregistered clinics.

Inadequate knowledge of contraception plays a major role in China’s annual abortion tally, according to CNN. China has a strict one-child policy, which the government has used to control its population growth. Abortion is legal in China and is widely used as a birth-control method. Abortions in China cost about 600 yuan, or $88, China Daily reported in July.

Meanwhile the United States with a population roughly a quarter that of China reported less than a 10th of the number of abortions–820,151–in 2005, the most recent figures available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2005 in the United States, the cost of a nonhospital abortion with local anesthesia at 10 weeks’ gestation ranged from $90 to $1,800; the average amount paid was $413, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

In the United States where abortions are less common and our culture is clearly divided on the ethics of abortion, how do you think people would react if a hospital released an ad similar to the Chinese one?